Palette Extractor

What does a palette extractor do?

This tool samples a reference and returns its dominant colours as a swatch list, a quick way to see the real palette an image is built from before you start mixing.

Why artists extract palettes

• Seeing a reference's actual dominant colours instead of guessing from memory
• Comparing how many genuinely distinct colours a piece needs, which is usually fewer than it looks
• Sorting swatches by value to see where a reference sits tonally, separate from hue
• Reading the value scale to see whether a palette's darks are actually dark (a clumped set of dots in the light half is the commonest reason a painting goes flat)
• Building a limited palette for a study, rather than reaching for every tube on the shelf

How this tool works

Upload a reference and set how many swatches to pull out. A blur slider smooths the source first so the palette reflects the image's real colour masses rather than noise or compression artefacts. Sort the resulting swatches by dominance, value, or hue depending on what you're trying to see, and click any swatch to copy its hex code straight to your clipboard. Under the swatches sits a fixed ten-step greyscale value scale, light to dark, with each extracted colour marked at its own lightness; that's the value string you'd paint beside a study, read straight off the reference. Below that, a temperature band plots the same colours warm-to-cool on the same left-to-right axis, so you can see at a glance whether the shadows in a reference go warmer or cooler than the lights. The downloaded PNG includes the swatch strip, the scale and the band.

Combine with other tools

• Feed the extracted palette into Paint Mixing to get a mixing recipe for each swatch
• When a reference has more than one hue family (skin and a red jumper, say), sample by hand in Paint Mixing and save each family as its own palette, since this tool splits the whole image at once
• Use Shape Simplifier alongside it to see which shapes each colour actually belongs to